At the Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Entertaining prehistoric adventure in a hollow Earth

At the Earth’s Core, a science fiction adventure novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was first serialized in 1914 issues of All-Story Weekly before being published as a book in 1922. The story is narrated by David Innes, a wealthy American mining mogul, who is discovered in the Sahara desert after having gone missing for 10 years. He relates how he and his friend Abner Perry, an elderly inventor, took a subterranean journey in a giant drilling machine of Perry’s invention. In simple terms, the gas pedal gets stuck, and David and Perry end up tunneling hundreds of miles through the Earth’s crust. When they burst through the inner edge of the crust, they discover another world on the interior concave surface of the globe. Referred to by its inhabitants as Pellucidar, this lost world is a throwback to prehistoric times filled with people and creatures that call to mind the surface world’s earlier stages of evolution.

As far back as the early 18th century, Hollow Earther pseudoscientists led by John Cleves Symmes Jr. proposed that another world exists on the inner surface of the Earth’s crust, similar to Pellucidar. This led to a slew of Hollow Earth sci-fi novels—some more serious, some more fanciful—including Symzonia (1820) by Captain Adam Seaborn (a pseudonym), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1867) by Jules Verne, Mizora (1881) by Mary E. Bradley Lane, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) by James De Mille, and The Smoky God (1908) by Willis George Emerson. Among this genre, At the Earth’s Core may just be the best of the bunch.

Burroughs’s science fiction is like that of Jules Verne but less dignified. Burroughs will start with a scientific premise similar to what one finds in a Verne novel, but Burroughs can’t help himself from indulging in the exploitative elements of pulp fiction: macho violence, beautiful damsels, and gratuitous gore. Burroughs’s novels lean more towards fantasy than sci-fi. If you want realism, look elsewhere, but Burroughs’s brand of adventure does have its amusing charms.

At the center of the Earth is a fiery nebula that serves as Pellucidar’s sun. On the inner surface of the globe, there is no night, only perpetual daylight. Because of this, Pellucidarians have no way of measuring time. They eat when they’re hungry; sleep when they’re tired. This makes some sense, but Burroughs takes the point to absurdity by repeatedly asserting that “time does not exist” in Pellucidar. Upon arriving in this lost world, David and Perry lose all conception of time, to the point where they can’t tell the difference between a second, an hour, or a month. Every time Burroughs brings up this idiotic idea, it is a glaring annoyance that spoils the reader’s experience of the fantasy world he has created.

Burroughs ends the book on a cliffhanger, leaving things open for a Pellucidar series of several novels, including the crossover book Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. Burroughs also created his own knockoff with the Caspak trilogy, beginning with The Land That Time Forgot, which takes place in another lost world (this time in the arctic) with prehistoric creatures, warring tribes of cavemen, a princess to be rescued, and bat-winged villains. I don’t consider myself a big Burroughs fan, but I did enjoy At the Earth’s Core. I would consider At the Earth’s Core one of Burroughs’s better books, as I would consider Journey to the Center of the Earth to be one of Verne’s worst books. Burroughs delivers on the monsters and action that one wishes there had been more of in Verne’s novel. Also worth a look is Lin Carter’s series of Zanthodon novels, a fun homage to Burroughs and Pellucidar, published from 1979 to 1982.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R34FWEKND67QP/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Journey to the Underground World by Lin Carter

A fun homage to Burroughs, Verne, and Conan Doyle
Science fiction and fantasy author Lin Carter’s 1979 novel Journey to the Underground World is the first book in his five-volume Zanthodon series. The story is narrated by Eric Carstairs, a modern-day swashbuckling adventurer in the mold of Han Solo or a precursor to Indiana Jones. In Egypt, Carstairs meets Professor Percival Potter, the sort of all-purpose Renaissance-man scientist one often encounters in these lost-world novels. Potter relates to Carstairs some legends he has turned up in his archaeological research that tell of an ancient, secret, underground world named Zanthodon. The professor hires Carstairs, a helicopter pilot, to fly him into the crater of a volcano in search of this mysterious lost world. Together, in one of the most bizarre helicopter flights ever, the two descend hundreds of miles beneath the surface of the earth to discover that the legends of Zanthodon are a reality. Beneath the Earth’s crust they find a hidden land populated by creatures long extinct in the surface world.

Carter was not the first to come up with the idea of a subsurface realm within a hollow Earth. Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, published in 1864, also depicted an underground world inhabited by prehistoric flora and fauna. That book is not Verne’s best work, and Carter’s is actually more exciting and enjoyable. Edgar Rice Burroughs also published seven novels on this premise, comprising the Pellucidar series, which I have not read. I can say, however, that Journey to the Underground World clearly pays homage to Burroughs’s Caspak series, consisting of The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, and Out of Time’s Abyss. To a lesser extent, it is also reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Carter doesn’t make any attempt to hide these associations but embraces them and blatantly pays tribute to his predecessors. In several instances in the narration, Carstairs emphasizes the fantastic nature of his adventure, describing Zanthodon with such phrases as “It was like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs.” For anyone who enjoys this genre of classic adventure fiction, Carter’s respectful tribute is very entertaining. He updates the thrills to suit the modern reader’s attention span, but never loses the pulp-fiction essence of the prior works he’s celebrating.

Conditions in Zanthodon are such that creatures of all time periods are allowed to mix and mingle in the ecosystem, so, for example, you might find a triceratops battling a woolly mammoth. As is usually the case in lost-world novels such as these, primitive humans are also prevalent. This allows Carter to satisfy the mandatory requirement for a scantily clad cavewoman, who delivers a cheesecake factor equivalent to Raquel Welch in the movie One Million Years B.C. At times Carter lays the naked-lady stuff on a little thick, making the reader wonder if he’s reading a book that was intended for 14-year-old boys to get off on. More often than not, however, the author skillfully handles the pulpy excesses of the genre to create a fun and entertaining read.

The book’s biggest fault is its ending, or rather, its lack thereof. Some very surprising developments take place in the final chapter, and then, like The Empire Strikes Back, it just ends with a cliffhanger. Burroughs’s Caspak novels did the same thing, so there is precedence for this decision on Carter’s part, but still it’s a let-down for the reader. As much as I enjoyed this book, I’m not sure I want to read five Zanthodon novels just to come to a resolution. On the bright side, they’re all available in one expensive ebook from Wildside Press, The Zanthodon Megapack.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R135Q9810GGN2N/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Out of Time’s Abyss by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Weakest link in the Caspak series
Out of Time’s Abyss was originally published in the November 1918 issue of the pulp fiction periodical Blue Book Magazine. It is the third novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Caspak trilogy, following The Land That Time Forgot and The People That Time Forgot. The three volumes relate the adventures of a group of lost travelers stranded on the lost continent of Caprona, also known as Caspak, where creatures from all stages of evolution coexist side by side. Though the stories of the three books are intertwined, each novel stars a different hero. Out of Time’s Abyss focuses on Bradley, one of the British sailors who arrived on the island in the first book. Although I found the first two volumes only mildly entertaining, I’m a sucker for a trilogy, so I stuck it out until the end. Unfortunately, the final novel is the least interesting of the three.

Bradley is captured by a winged creature called a Wieroo, an intelligent humanoid species unique to Caspak. The Wieroo takes him to the island of Oo-oh, where he is imprisoned within the Wieroo capital city. While in captivity, Bradley gains first-hand experience of Wieroo culture, which places the most brutal and violent killers at the apex of their social, political, and religious hierarchy. He also learns the strange mechanics of how evolution works on Caspak. The previous volumes had hinted at this mysterious secret so thoroughly that the ultimate revelation is anticlimactic. The final explanation is also terribly confusing and leaves many questions unanswered. While engineering his own escape, Bradley discovers that he is not the only human captive in the Wieroo citadel. He frees a woman prisoner named Co-Tan, and together the two seek a means of egress from the island.

Despite the science fiction elements carried over from the first two novels, this book is purely a horror story. The Wieroo are hideous demons more at home in a tale of the supernatural than in a lost world adventure. What I liked about the first two novels was the biological and evolutionary diversity of Caspak. The fictional world that Burroughs created is loaded with possibilities, but here the concept is squandered even more than in the first two volumes. By focusing on the Wieroo, Burroughs abandons the prehistoric subject matter entirely, instead opting for creepy, blood-thirsty villains that could just as easily inhabit another planet. Aren’t tyrannosaurs, pterodactyls, woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, and Cro-Magnon hunters exciting enough? Why does Burroughs have to resort to bat-winged vampire men? To be fair, there are a few moments of spine-tingling suspense and macabre thrills among the Wieroo, but mostly it’s just the usual repetitive cycle of capture and escape.

The appearance of Co-Tan provides yet another opportunity for a cavewoman romance, which, after the first two books, feels all too familiar. In fact, the grand finale of the series only reinforces how little the three novels differ from one another. Reading the adventures of Tyler, Billings, and Bradley—the three heroes of the three Caspak novels—is a lot like experiencing the same story thrice. The second book, The People That Time Forgot, is the best of the three, but in its foreshadowing of future revelations it makes promises that Out of Time’s Abyss doesn’t keep. If you’re reading this review, it’s probably too late to advise you to avoid the first two installments, but I can warn you that this third and final volume is probably not worth your time.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
http://www.amazon.com/review/RYN5B02UIRN8L/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The sequel that saved a series
Originally published in Blue Book Magazine in 1918, The People That Time Forgot is the second novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Caspak trilogy, following The Land That Time Forgot and preceding Out of Time’s Abyss. I didn’t care much for The Land That Time Forgot because it took too long to get anywhere and was more of an introduction to the series than a complete novel in and of itself. Still, I was intrigued enough by the world Burroughs created to tough it out for another volume. The People That Time Forgot, thankfully, actually does qualify as a self-contained novel with a beginning, middle, and end all its own. Picking up where the last book left off, this adventure story hits the ground running and fares much better at engaging the reader than its predecessor.

The first book was narrated by Bowen J. Tyler, who wrote of his adventures in the lost continent of Caprona, which the locals call Caspak. Tyler stuffed his manuscript into a bottle and tossed it into the sea. In the second book, the man who found that bottle (ostensibly Burroughs himself) takes the manuscript to Tyler’s family in California. Tom Billings, a sort of servant’s-kid-turned-adopted-brother to Bowen, quickly organizes an expedition to find Caprona and rescue his lost friend. Billings’s ship locates Caprona easily enough, but the island is surrounded by steep cliffs that prevent entry into the interior. The resourceful Billings solves this problem by flying over the cliffs with a seaplane. His rescue effort is jeopardized, however, when his plane crashes and he must concentrate his efforts on rescuing himself.

In Caspak, prehistoric creatures of every stage of evolution coexist, anything but peacefully. One never knows if he will run into an Allosaurus, a Smilodon, or an Australopithecus behind the next grove of palm trees. The native inhabitants of Caspak are segregated into a social strata of tribes based on their stage of evolutionary development, from the Alu (ape men), to the Sto-lu (missing links), Bo-lu (Neanderthals), Band-lu (Cro-Magnons), Kro-lu (early homo sapiens), and Galu (modern homo sapiens). The People That Time Forgot is aptly titled because this volume primarily focuses on Billings moving about among these various peoples, interacting with them, and unintentionally getting involved in their tribal politics. Early in the book Billings encounters a Galu woman named Ajor, a beautiful but filthy barbarian, who becomes his companion as he travels toward the coast in hopes of reuniting with his shipmates.

This book is by no means a masterpiece. It gets pretty dull at times, and the evolutionary workings of Caspak are often quite confusing. Yet, when judged alongside similar fare of roughly the same era—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, or Burroughs' own The Land That Time Forgot—it shines by comparison. The stories of Billings and Tyler are far less interesting than the land of Caspak itself, which is loaded with fictional possibilities. It would be a great setting for a TV or comic book series (in fact, the Savage Land of the Marvel Comics universe is likely a Caspak knockoff). While the first book only hinted at the mysteries of this lost continent, the second installment reveals its strange characteristics in far more detail. Nevertheless, Burroughs has left many questions unanswered which will no doubt fuel the plot of the trilogy’s third and final volume. I’m glad I stuck it out through the second book and am looking forward to the finale.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2PSW5U3RNSF6V/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Get to the dinosaurs already
The Land That Time Forgot, a science-fiction novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was originally serialized in Blue Book Magazine in 1918 and first published as a book in 1924. The story opens with a narrator, presumably Burroughs himself, describing how on a fishing trip off the coast of Greenland he discovered a manuscript in a bottle which serves as the text of this novel. The narrative is written in the first person by Bowen J. Tyler, the heir to a shipbuilding firm in Santa Monica, California. After enlisting for military service in World War I, he finds himself on a passenger ship out of England, bound for the battlefields of France. He sees action sooner than expected, however, when his ride is sunk by a German U-boat. Tyler and his spunky dog manage to end up alone on a lifeboat with a beautiful woman. Eventually, through a series of convolutions best left unrevealed, he ends up capturing the U-boat. Luckily, it just so happens that his father’s company built the craft, and Tyler himself conveniently helped design it, so he takes command of the ship and attempts to pilot it to a safe port.

The naval action goes on for four chapters (out of ten) before we finally get to what the title promises. After losing their way in the South Pacific, Tyler and his shipmates discover the lost continent of Caprona. I don’t think I’m giving too much away by revealing that they meet dinosaurs there. In fact, the wildlife in Caprona is not a frozen slice of the Mesozoic Era, but rather a spectrum of creatures from all stages of evolution, including various species of primitive man. Tyler later learns that the local name for Caprona is Caspak. While he and his crew were hoping for a short stop to replenish their supplies, through unforeseen circumstances they end up stranded in this strange and dangerous land.

I’m an enthusiast of vintage adventure fiction, so I’m receptive to what Burroughs has to offer, but I’ve never been fully satisfied by the few works of his that I’ve read. The original Tarzan novel struck me as hacky and foolish. The Land That Time Forgot fares better, but not much. It’s not hacky, but it isn’t great either. In Caspak, Burroughs has created a fantasy world with the potential to be fascinating, but he doesn’t do anything interesting with it. Too much time is spent on the U-boat, and not enough time among the prehistoric wildlife. The plot is often driven by miraculous coincidences rather than heroic ingenuity. The prehistoric creatures are too easily killed to engender much suspense. Later in the book Tyler informs us that he has discovered “the miraculous, the gigantic truth” of Caspak, but he doesn’t let us in on the secret. This book is incomplete in and of itself and essentially acts as a prologue to another novel. Like The Empire Strikes Back, its purpose is merely to set up the next installment in the series. That would be The People That Time Forgot, the second book in a Caspak trilogy.

One can’t help but compare this book to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World. Each is flawed in its own way. Doyle’s novel is laden with racism and genocide while Burroughs manages to work in an anti-Bolshevik message sympathetic to the German Empire. In the political correctness department, I’ll give Burroughs the edge, but I still like The Lost World better for its sense of humor and interesting characters. As a hero, Tyler is as dull as dishwater, and his romance with the requisite damsel in distress Lys is insipid and cloying. Perhaps the entire Caspak trilogy adds up to a good novel, but The Land That Time Forgot by itself is a disappointment. Even so, I might just find myself reading the second book, in hopes that it will live up to the potential that this volume squanders.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R37DZRGQN8SZOW/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The awkward first steps of a classic hero
Edgar Rice Burroughs deserves a healthy dose of applause for creating the timeless character of Tarzan. The jungle hero has had an indelible impact on popular culture, becoming a household name through his many incarnations in novels, film, and comics. With such classic literary icons, it’s often interesting and fun to go back and read the original source material from which they sprang. That’s not true in this case, however, as Tarzan of the Apes, originally published in 1912, proves an inauspicious debut. As a fan of classic adventure literature and pulp fiction, I understand that often a reader must suspend disbelief to enjoy a good adventure, but in this novel Burroughs asks for far too much gullibility on the part of the reader, and does not provide enough satisfaction in return.

John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, is on a diplomatic expedition to Africa to investigate the working conditions at some colonial plantations. When mutiny breaks out on the ship in which he and his wife are passengers, their lives are spared, but they are abandoned on a remote beach on the west coast of the dark continent. They eventually die in this harsh environment, but not before leaving behind an infant son. This orphaned boy of noble heritage is adopted by a she-ape and raised as a member of her simian community.

It’s natural that Tarzan, having grown up in this wild and savage environment, would come to possess a physical strength that would be considered superhuman by the standards of civilized men. That’s not enough for Burroughs, however, who also endows his hero with superhuman intelligence. Tarzan finds his parents’ library, and, without any contact with another human being, teaches himself to read and write. If that’s not unbelievable enough, somehow he also, with no knowledge of spoken English, manages to phonetically spell his own name.

When he reaches manhood Tarzan begins to encounter some of the native African people, his first contact with humans. Eventually a party of white people appears on his secluded shores, marooned by mutineers just as his parents were decades before. Though one of them is even a relative of Tarzan, this group of English and American travelers is not out looking for the Greystokes. It is simply an incredible coincidence that they happen to end up in Tarzan’s proximity. Through Tarzan’s interactions with these white people, a series of misunderstandings arises that takes until the end of the book to resolve. For example, despite finding the bodies of Lord and Lady Greystoke and their belongings, it never occurs to any of the slow-witted castaways that this mysterious white jungle man might be their son. For brevity’s sake, I can’t begin to catalog all the convoluted story elements that continually affirm the ignorance of each and every character in this story, but the entire book is spent waiting in protracted frustration for the clueless characters to figure out things that the reader already knows.

There is a fair amount of racism in the book, though not uncommon for its time. Far more offensive are the clumsily constructed plot and the frequent departures from logical reality. The best parts of the book are the action scenes, but after Tarzan kills five or six lions, even that becomes tedious. Burroughs wrote at least 25 Tarzan books. As an advocate of adventure literature, I really hope they are not all as bad as this one. Tarzan of the Apes is a rare case in which the original novel does not live up to the majority of the countless imitators it inspired.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1B7WMGHNUMQ9L/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm